


A Lesson in the Things Unsaid

by elle_nic



Category: Sharp Objects (TV)
Genre: Dark, F/F, I Tried, Joya is the true villain here, My First Work in This Fandom, TW: Mentions of abuse, adora crellin is so fucking interesting, and the rest of them too tho lmao, fiction&femslashevent, tw: allusion to r!pe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 18:08:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20375884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_nic/pseuds/elle_nic
Summary: Adora was born silently... She was born. And she was silent.





	A Lesson in the Things Unsaid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kerrykins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerrykins/gifts).

> First work for this fandom and ship so let me know your thoughts! :)))
> 
> For Kerry, who again, is the reason I watched this show <3

Adora was born silently. She had never kicked in the womb, never gave Joya morning sickness, never grew too large that Joya was permanently altered from the pregnancy. Adora was born. And she was born silent. Adora latched on perfectly when presented with her mother’s breast. She burped, and she blinked, looked up at Joya and in her inky black eyes, she felt love. Love of the most fundamental sort. Love that, even instinctual, ingrained in biology and evolution, was not mirrored in sea glass eyes. Adora was born, and she grew and she was perfect. She was born. And she was silent.

Jackie was born in a heatwave. She was laboured over for a long time, then born very quickly. There were flowers for her arrival, and sweaty, grinning faces that loved, loved, _loved_. Jackie didn’t latch on until the next morning. She didn’t stop crying or squirming, didn’t open her eyes. She was loved. Her mother would not relinquish her to anyone, even to sleep. Even to get the poor babe to stop crying. Jackie, even then, did not listen very well to her mother. But she was born. And she was loud. 

Joya and Suzanna were friends of circumstance, both having children the same age and living in the same dead end town. Joya was silent at the gatherings she’d host between the Preakers and O’Neills. Suzanna would drink the amaretto sours and would smile and laugh delightedly. Joya would sit upon the porch loveseat with her, like a needle in a pincushion, and would listen to the honey-haired woman recite prose about her precious girl. Joya would not speak about Adora, who was upstairs being watched over by the maid. She would preen about having borne a daughter, would smile waspishly, not showing her teeth in case they cut her lip. Adora was silent. Joya was, too.

When Adora was five years old, Joya made her a dress. Adora had pointed to the pink fabric, because it was her mother’s favourite, and Joya had grinned. Adora was tugged to a stool where Joya placed her, batting her hands down and away and measuring her, pulling the tape tight as a noose. Adora was silent. She didn’t breathe or blink or smile. She was still, and Joya was not. Her mother moved like a viper, held needles in her hands, stroking them like pets. Adora sighed when the pins would stab her, pierce her flesh and invite gems of garnet blood to the pink fabric, mellowing to rust before her eyes. Joya was precise, always so accurate, that Adora knew her mother liked her rubied skin. And still, Adora was silent.

Adora had bled for the first time when her mother poked her awake. Jackie, quiet for once, was sleeping beside her, a precious face for Adora to study. Joya hadn’t said anything, just gripped her arm and jerked her out of bed and behind her, caught in the vice of fear and obedience and the hateful silence she had been born in. She had blinked blearily in the light of the Wind Gap streetlights, hidden a yawn behind the freight train travelling through town and frowned at the forest that swallowed their car. Joya kept the car idle, but Adora was not so lucky.

Her pale pink nightgown was filthy when Joya stopped. Joya, her eyes as green as the darkened forest, placed her on a felled log and stared at her. Adora, her pretty nightgown caked in pink and frills and mud, looked up at her, too. Her eyes were no longer the inky black of a newborn. They were the tortured blue of a Preaker daughter, and they shone with the shadows of the forest and the moon and a worried love for her mother who hated her. Adora stared and stared and stared, and though Joya was looking, too, she didn’t stare back. Sea glass eyes looked from the muddy hem to the lacy sleeves of the pink gown and then to the peachy perfection of Adora’s hair. She turned and walked away. Adora did not call for her.

Adora counted the strips of yellow in the middle of the road on the way home as the predawn light melted into the sky. She arrived to the gravel drive that led to the porch as the sky was lightening still, and walked without consideration on the rocky ground, cringing when the rocks stabbed into the arches of her feet and when the frills of her nightgown brushed against her neck. She remembered the sting of needles in her skin, how her mother’s teeth were far too sharp for the delicate flesh of her lips. How Joya’s mouth bled and her eyes didn’t. How Adora bled. How Adora was silent. She arrived at the porch door, took six measured steps and saw her mother.

“You’re home,” Joya said. No colour in her voice. No surprise, no spark of being impressed. No love.

Adora didn’t respond.

She was bathed and dressed in another, similar nightgown and laying beside Jackie again before the other girl had even woken. Adora spent the rest of the early morning looking at the honey hair of her best friend, and the slender, upturned nose and the pretty little beauty spot under her left eye. When her eyes would open they would be dark and rich, blazing if the sun was in them. Adora wondered if maybe Jackie could love her enough. If maybe she could love Jackie enough to forget the smell of amaretto and the taste of garnet blood and the caress of winking needles.

Maybe, she thought, as a strip of sun landed on Jackie’s soft face.

Maybe not.

She hated the way Jackie tasted when they kissed the first time. Like those amaretto sours their mothers always sipped. That the flavour made her mouth water was irrelevant to Adora, who was trying to kiss the liquor flavour from Jackie’s mouth. That Jackie was gripping her around her waist, tighter that Joya had in years, was only lingering in her mind in the background. At the forefront, was that Adora Preaker, Wind Gap princess, was kissing her only friend and hating it.

They kissed late into the night and stopped only when Adora said they could. Jackie’s lips had been pink and swollen and looked quite tender at the end, and Adora in some foreign spot in her chest, felt pride thump heavily in time to her heartbeat. Jackie had grinned at her, her teeth blunt and gentle against her lips, never drawing blood, and fell to sleep in a dazed splendour which Adora quite enjoyed seeing. She did not sleep herself, though. She laid awake staring at the ceiling of Jackie’s bedroom and breathed in the scent of Mrs O’Neill’s home. Preaker Place had never smelled like that. Adora knew why.

Jackie and Adora hadn’t been speaking when Adora had been fucked quickly behind the cinema by some faceless man. They hadn’t been talking when Joya found her stomach swelling. They hadn’t been talking when Alan and she had married quickly amongst the rose bushes, the bride yearning masochistically for their thorns. Adora had not spoken to anyone for a long time, only to her growing belly which made her sick at all hours and streaked her stomach with pink scars. She wanted a place, finally, for her love to go instead of being holed up in the space between her ribs and in the gap between her eyes and the redness of her hair. She wanted something that would look up at her with inky black eyes and see love mirrored back. She wanted a baby.

But she had gotten Camille.

Jackie had loved her, naturally, and Adora thought she did, too, for a time. When she was sitting in the hospital bed, the one her mother had had set aside for when she’d give birth, she had been excited to see her belly deflate, to have her baby. She had never wavered in that during the waves of muscle that coiled and snapped within her, nor when she had split herself apart to bring her child into the world. She had sobbed an excited laugh and ignored Alan who smiled in grimace beside her.

She was floating above her bed when the nurse, features forgotten, gave her her pinked baby, squeaking perfectly. Adora looked down at her face, her shock of red hair, and waited with a still heart for her eyes to open. Inky black and unfocussed eyes peered up at her several long minutes later, and Adora’s smile, the last one she had bothered to conjure, melted from her face and down her neck to stain on the neckline of her gown. Preaker blue eyes looked down with a love of the most fundamental sort. A love that was not mirrored in inky black.

Joya, who hadn’t smiled with teeth since Adora was five, had never chapped her lips so much before Camille Preaker was born. She smiled when Camille cried and Adora couldn’t soothe her, smiled even more so when Camille wouldn’t feed, when she would scream all through the night. Camille’s eyes had settled from inky black to the sea glass shade of Joya’s reptilian gaze. Adora, when she woke to see the change in her child’s eye colour, decided Camille was not hers. Camille was a Preaker, and Adora was a Crellin. Joya could have her. Or even Jackie — the pathetic woman, always drunk on amaretto sours – could have her.

She didn’t speak to Jackie again, not truly, and she continued to ignore Alan. She had Marian and doted too much on her, nursed her into her own coffin. Camille watched on with sea glass eyes that Adora hated, and Jackie always tried to talk like they used to between amaretto kisses. Adora so wanted a child to love, one strong enough to live through her care, one kind enough to let her kill them, one with Preaker blue eyes and not sea glass. So, she had Amma.

Amma had been the strongest and the sweetest, but she made Adora worry the most. She was such a sweet thing, such a sneaky thing on her roller blades, with her cropped shirts and bubblegum mouth. She had the Preaker blue eyes that Camille didn’t and the strength Marian hadn’t. Her girl, _finally_. Someone to love. Someone to kill softly the way she wished Joya had with her. She wished Joya would’ve taken those needles and sewn a smile onto her mouth, carved her teeth sharp enough to slice her lips. She wished, she wished, she wished.

She wished Jackie would stop trying to talk to her. She wished Camille hadn’t been born. She wished Amma hadn’t been spirited away by sea glass eyes and peachy red hair. She sat in her orange suit, the colour of hazard, and wished for inky black, instead. If she were different, she might cry. Might scream. Might howl.

But she was Adora.

And she was silent.


End file.
